Compound switch consisting of gap-variable silicon nanowire waveguide couplers

We propose a compound optical-path switch using microelectromechanical silicon nano-wire gap-variable waveguide couplers. A 2 × 6 switch composed of five 2 × 2 switches was designed and fabricated. The operation of the 2 × 6 switch was confirmed in the experiment, and the insertion loss of the single 2 × 2 switch was evaluated to be about 0.3 dB. The port isolation between distant ports is higher than 20 dB. Due to the capacitive operation, the proposed waveguide switch consumes negligible power.